Dragon's Dogma

As usual, my ebay guy gets me the game the day after ordering. Now installing the "optional" HD texture pack, though it really isn't that optional - without it all the textures are really, really basic, a bit like a lot of games powered by Unreal engine where they take a few seconds to load fully. The first Mass effect springs readily to mind. So yeah, unless you want Dogma to feel like a PS2 game, the textures are a must.

I haven't played the game for a while, and my Arisen - a rather confident level 146 - is now marching straight into the new Bitterblack Isle, though I'm doing so with Pawn in tow. In postgame vanilla Dogma, I ended up benching her and using the Autonomy augment to hugely buff myself, but I think it'll be nice having her learn all the new stuff the DLC has to offer.

Onwards, Arisen!

Just encountered my first Gorecyclops. Holy hell. A vanilla Cyclops is what... twenty, thirty feet tall? The Gorecyclops is first seen chained to a wall, and must be one hundred feet tall. "No problem," I thought, "I'll bust out one of my top tier spells, they make short work of everything bar Grigori."

High Bolide it is. Meteors rain down, and one of them smashes the chains holding the Gorecyclops in place, whereby he suddenly rushes forward and swings at me, knocking off half my health in one blow. I know I'm a slightly squishy Sorceror, but I'm level 147 - nothing except the Ur Dragon has hurt me like that for the last eighty or so levels. Oh, and my High Bolide did next to nothing, doing perhaps three quarters of a health bar damage. This thing has eight health bars.

This might take a while.

A couple of hours in, and some thoughts on the changes between vanilla DD and Dark Arisen;

* They changed the song on the title menu. The brilliantly awful j-pop song is gone. Boo!
* Texture pack install is a must.
* Bitterblack Isle feels very Dark Souls; no bad thing that because Lordran was gorgeous. DA is all moody lighting, foreboding architecture and desolate castle walkways infested with monsters. The atmosphere is more oppressive than vanilla Dogma's ever was.
* New enemies! Some of which are genuinely very tough. Part of the fun of DD is working out the weaknesses of new and seemingly unbeatable building-sized foes.
* New Weapons! Thus far, they're a bit crap, but then I am running DragonForged Ur Dragon gear. Speaking of which...
* New upgrades! Yep, Dragonforged is no longer the highest tier possible, there are now two tiers beyond that, shown only as Lv 1 and Lv 2 in my menu. Some of the stat gains are huge - one piece of headgear shown jumped from 55 defense Dragonforged to 90 defense at lvl 2 Dragonforged. These upgrades cost Rift Crystals rather than gold, and require what look to be very rare items to boot. Luckily, I still have around 1.5m Crystals on hand from my play through of the vanilla game, but those items are going to take some finding.
* Bring a lantern and lots of oil. The depths of Bitterblack Isle are really, really dark.
* Finally, some kind of confirmation as to the role of The Arisen... SPOILERS FOR THE END OF DRAGON'S DOGMA!

Spoiler:

SimianWonder wrote:

Just encountered my first Gorecyclops. Holy hell. A vanilla Cyclops is what... twenty, thirty feet tall? The Gorecyclops is first seen chained to a wall, and must be one hundred feet tall. "No problem," I thought, "I'll bust out one of my top tier spells, they make short work of everything bar Grigori."

High Bolide it is. Meteors rain down, and one of them smashes the chains holding the Gorecyclops in place, whereby he suddenly rushes forward and swings at me, knocking off half my health in one blow. I know I'm a slightly squishy Sorceror, but I'm level 147 - nothing except the Ur Dragon has hurt me like that for the last eighty or so levels. Oh, and my High Bolide did next to nothing, doing perhaps three quarters of a health bar damage. This thing has eight health bars.

This might take a while.

I assume that's the same one I encountered, although there are probably more of them. I chose to ignore the blue map icon to check out the small doors and see if there was extra crap to find first before progress, and all of a sudden I'm fixing a rift stone, getting eaten by a giant weiner that came out of a chest and then I'm heading down this large room with wimpy skeleton sorcerers and that giant ass cyclops.

A few hours further in and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. The enemies are tough, that's a given, but the promise of new skills, new weapons, new weapon tiers and more horrible monsters to slaughter in ever-increasingly imaginative ways gets my figurative juices flowing.

I've died several times too, something that hasn't happened in the vanilla game since my first play through, and been forced to hire pawns rather than running solo - even with Autonomy buffing my stats, solo just doesn't cut it in a room full of enemies that can still do very real damage to you. I also changed class, from Sorceror to Magic Archer, because Sorc doesn't really have much in the way of quick attacks, whereas MK specialises in them. It makes taking out the small fry considerably easier.

I'd guess I'm getting near the end now, if I'm not there already. Story wise, Bitterblack Isle has spilled it's big reveal during the last boss fight, and I've fought several new and extremely unpleasant enemies; Death itself making several fleeting appearances to one-shot my pawns before retreating, but the most irritating being Garms. These are huge wolf-like things, roughly comparable in size to the Griffon or Cockatrice that spawn near other dead things to eat them, much like the Elder Ogre and Cursed Dragon enemies, the biggest difference being that Garm seem to roam in pairs or even in groups of three. They're very quick, very agile and very aggressive. A group of them can quickly separate your party and make life very difficult for you.

Thankfully, being giant-wolves, they suffer from the same weakness as vanilla or Direwolves; set them on fire and they'll roll around to put themselves out. Hit them hard at this point - though I do mean, really, really, hard - and you might knock off a good chunk of health.

Oh, and my current situation - getting my arse kicked by what I suspect will be the end boss, a large flying gargoyle like thing that not only has enormous physical clout, but also chain-casts some very unpleasant spells. What doesn't help is that, having fought our way to him, my party is largely carrying a lot of surplus (cursed weapons ready for purifying, rare materials etc) that I do not wish to discard, yet it is close to overencumbering me, slowing me down. I'm also really low on curative items, and have no wakestones. I've hit this thing several times, and each time he's shrugged off my best efforts. He'd crush Grigori with his little finger.

Yeah, that was the last boss, Daimon. After getting my arse handed to me as a Magick Archer, I used a Liftstone (like a Ferrystone, but only works within BBI) to return to the entrance to the Isle, whereby I could change class to something a little heavier hitting. Mystic Knight being that class.

Fought my way back down to Daimon again, and barring a couple of slip ups en route as I tried to rush through a room with two Gorecylopes and three Garms resulting in a swift and painful death, I made it to him and beat him very comfortably, not hurt by the fact that you only need to get him down three of his ten health bars before... ah yes, the story.

Spoiler:

Hmm, there have been a lot of balance changes in DA, not all in our favour either. The augments Bloodlust and Autonomy, the ones that each gave you a 70% bonus to strength, magic and defence when adventuring at night or solo respectively have been hugely nerfed, their total increases now amounting to 40% rather than 140%.

In essence, in Dogma you could take a mediocre build and suddenly increase his base strength from 1000 to 2400 with those two augments. In DA that will only increase to 1400. To be fair, I can see why Bloodlust was nerfed - venturing out at night wasn't that big a deal once you knew your way around, especially with a full party. Autonomy though? Trading in three pawns for a measly 20% increase seems like something very few would be willing to do.

Oh, and on the subject of DA, once you beat Daimon and release Ashe the dungeon resets itself. You need to work your way through it again to unlock later areas, only this time the enemy positions have changed, there are new variants to fight and the treasure chests all hold greater loot. Some of the gear makes the top tier stuff in Dogma look like utter junk.

unless i'm doing something wrong the disc save DOESN'T work on the digital copy  

testtubebaby wrote:

unless i'm doing something wrong the disc save DOESN'T work on the digital copy  

Yeah thats pretty common unfortunately. I didn't know that was the case with this though.

Superbuu3 wrote:

testtubebaby wrote:

unless i'm doing something wrong the disc save DOESN'T work on the digital copy  

Yeah thats pretty common unfortunately.  I didn't know that was the case with this though.

my pawn will still be accessible to you though when you want to play it, i just cant get him armored correctly anymore

I think Sora should have a pawn if he's a bro.

Of course. Mine's been there since DD was still a thing. Ya can't exactly get rid of 'im. Of course, now he looks like Kevin Sorbo instead of David Cross, so there's 90% less hilarity.

SOK wrote:

Of course. Mine's been there since DD was still a thing. Ya can't exactly get rid of 'im. Of course, now he looks like Kevin Sorbo instead of David Cross, so there's 90% less hilarity.

You mean Hercules

If he were a mage(sometimes sorcerer).

Dark Arisen is free on PSN? Bah. As much as I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Gransys, I spent over two hundred hours on the 360 game and don't think I have the enthusiasm to do it all over again,.

Seeing a dragon pull a little ginger kid's heart out and eat it was rather shocking.

I can't really get into this game. There's too much RPG stuff for my liking, and most of the quests I've gotten aren't really quests. Just kill x amount of y thing. I have to fill the lamp with oil when it runs out. There's too many menus. I find it hard to understand the combat with the pawns running around doing their own thing.

It makes me miss the simple, colourful world of Amalur.

There are lot of of the kill x amount of y quests, but they're only there to help get early exp and gold. The proper side quests do come. It's quite a hardcore old-school RPG, but the UI isn't particularly well designed which can make navigating the menus needlessly frustrating.

It does pick up though, especially as you start to learn your way around it.

The letterboxing in this game is just plain awful, I don't understand why its in here the game doesn't look that nice, character models are good, but the low res environment textures are really noticeable after playing demon souls. I really don't understand why a game would letterbox, I could understand if it was going for 60fps but this is dropping below 30 in places so it just feels badly designed.

Anyway i like the combat in the tutorial i made a female as i'm going for a rogue/thief build. I want to make my pawn gandalf so hopefully beard options are good.

Superbuu3 wrote:

The letterboxing in this game is just plain awful, I don't understand why its in here the game doesn't look that nice, character models are good, but the low res environment textures are really noticeable after playing demon souls.  I really don't understand why a game would letterbox, I could understand if it was going for 60fps but this is dropping below 30 in places so it just feels badly designed.

Anyway i like the combat in the tutorial i made a female as i'm going for a rogue/thief build.  I want to make my pawn gandalf so hopefully beard options are good.

told you before, women are good for nothing in this game.

testtubebaby wrote:

Superbuu3 wrote:

The letterboxing in this game is just plain awful, I don't understand why its in here the game doesn't look that nice, character models are good, but the low res environment textures are really noticeable after playing demon souls.  I really don't understand why a game would letterbox, I could understand if it was going for 60fps but this is dropping below 30 in places so it just feels badly designed.

Anyway i like the combat in the tutorial i made a female as i'm going for a rogue/thief build.  I want to make my pawn gandalf so hopefully beard options are good.

told you before, women are good for nothing in this game.

I'm just making the game harder, i'm refusing to use other people's pawns to. It seems a bit pointless given that enemies are pretty incompetent. The only thing that killed me was a boulder falling on my head. I made my pawn a 7 foot mage, so he should be able to mule for me. I'm only panning on giving him fireballs attack buffs anyways.

This game takes forever.  I killed the dragon although I refused to rescue my 'beloved' as it was aelinore, but the game insisted on giving me a game over.  I was going for Madeleine so this all kinda annoyed me.  Selina is in my house for come reason I'm hoping she gets lost at some point.  

Apparently I gotta go through the everfall and that sounds long the evil eye I first fought took a while to kill.  I have not planned out anything in this game adn i feel like that might bite me in the ass as I should've been more efficient with my build.  Plus I feel like changing vocation every few minutes.  BTW mages and sorceror's are boring as fuck to play and I have no clue why anyone would want to.  I guess its nice you can clim on monster heads, but magic archers look way cooler, I will try Dark Knight later to.  My main gripe is arrows seem to do fuck all damage. Especially as you can't really aim the magic archer arrows.

Should've given the ring to Madeleine if you wanted her to be your beloved.

Baal wrote:

Should've given the ring to Madeleine if you wanted her to be your beloved.

I'm in post game I'm hoping I can still change that. I guess Aelinore is ok, so it could be worse.